Easy Digital Downloads: The Best Digital Downloads Plugin for WordPress?

May 24, 2017

When it comes to making money online, I consider offering digital products for purchase on a blog to be a great option. I am in fact currently in the middle of creating a guide that I intend to release via my own blog. It is therefore rather timely that my attention has been brought to Easy Digital Downloads — a free plugin that is specifically designed to enable the selling of digital products via WordPress. It promises to be a lightweight and intuitive solution, but does it deliver?

Creating Product Pages

The Easy Digital Downloads plugin creates a custom post type, in which you can enter all of the information relevant to your product: As you can see, there is room for you to enter a product description, along with fields pertaining to specific product information. Let’s take a closer look at the Download Configuration options: As you can see, there is nothing too complicated to tackle here. Just enter a price and download location, and you’re set.You can also enable variable pricing (i.e. multiple price points), and add product notes that will be added to the purchase receipt.

What the User Sees

On the front end, Easy Digital Downloads offers a seamless user experience that melts into your theme’s design: The plugin is AJAX-enabled, so the user is passed from one stage of the purchasing process to the next without a hitch: The plugin offers a great choice of payment gateways— PayPal and manual payment options are included as standard, with add-ons available for Stripe, PayPal Pro, PayPal Express, and others.

Payment History and Reporting

Easy Digital Downloads offers up comprehensive archives and reports for your payment history and sales results:

Payment History

Sales Reports

As you can see, it is easy to keep track of sales and analyze your products’ performance.

But That’s Not All…

Although Easy Digital Downloads is a lightweight plugin with a focus on just one specific intended purpose, that does not limit its functionality. Beyond the features covered above, it also offers:

If you are looking to sell products via your WordPress blog, this is the best solution that I am aware of. And best of all, the base product (which alone offers a great level of functionality) is completely free! Download Easy Digital Downloads here.

This is great, but I my client want something even simpler. I intend to use a custom post type with meta boxes as products. add a paypal buy now button programmatically, and use paypal IPN to retrieve completed orders details (invoice ID#, customer name) to wordpress backend for record keeping.
Will you come up with anything similar?